Cantina Creative Develops New Workflows with HP Z6 G5 A

Cantina Creative Develops New Workflows with HP Z6 G5 A 

Studio Accelerates Adobe Substance 3D Asset Creation and Finishing with AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO CPU

Boutique design and visual effects studio Cantina Creative is known for bringing fantastical and futuristic ideas to life. From creating a  CG leather map for "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power" to crafting  technology user interfaces (UIs) for "Avatar: The Way of Water," the company has specialized in design-driven storytelling since its founding in 2010. Over the years, Cantina Creative has grown and evolved, notably adopting a hybrid setup in 2020 and becoming part of the Territory Group in 2022. Today, the studio maintains offices in Los Angeles and Vancouver, with about 25 artists working locally and remotely at any given time. HP workstations have long been a key part of its workflow, so when given the opportunity to test the new  Z6 G5 A featuring the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO CPU provided by HP, the Cantina Creative team jumped at the chance. 

"As soon as we found out about the HP Z series with Threadripper, we immediately wanted to try it out. We do a lot of CPU-based rendering with [Autodesk] Arnold and Threadrippers come in super handy for that," shared Stephen Lawes, Cantina Creative Co-founder and Creative Director. 

Pushing boundaries 

Cantina Creative's experience with the Z6 G5 A coincided with a major, yet-to-be-released project. At the same time, artists were collaborating with Adobe to showcase the new abilities of Adobe Substance by creating 3D objects in the application, then exporting those assets to Maxon's Cinema 4D or Adobe After Effects for finishing. Featuring 4K textures and complex modeling, the demo assets also made use of Substance's new photogrammetry tool, which generated dense meshes. The studio's experimentation for Adobe informed its client work.

"We were using the Z6 G5 A to push the software and try to find breaking points. It was startlingly fast and everyone has been astounded how it flies through Arnold scenes," shared Lawes. "The machine is really compact, which is great, and doesn't consume a lot of energy."

Infrastructure explained

With a hybrid workflow, Cantina Creative artists can work from anywhere in the world and remotely access workstations at either studio location. If needed, projects can be isolated so artists must be physically present to work on them. Currently, nearly two thirds of the studio's owned workstations are HP.

"We've gradually migrated to HP for most of our production machines after seeing how powerful they are. We prefer to purchase our hardware, and the speed and cost they offer is a really good balance for us," explained Douglas Renn, Cantina Creative Director of Technology. 

Regarding the Z6 G5 A specifically, Lawes concluded, "Our problem now is that our artists don't want to use anything else because this is so much faster. It's hard to put that genie back in the bottle."

Find out how HP Z series workstations can transform your creative workflows: https://www.hp.com/us-en/workstations/z6-a.html